Ranter
Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
![](/static/devrant/img/pipeless-devrant-banner-white.png)
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Comments
-
It’s an attempted get about the English limitations of the term “biweekly” and “bimonthly”.
Biweekly is understood to mean either “twice weekly” or “every other week”. And bimonthly is the same “twice monthly” or “every other month”. And yes, they do over lap as anything that happens biweekly (either sense) is also bimonthly (first sense) depending on the cadence.
Quarterly means once every three months so trimonthly isn’t a real term. And as a month usually has four weeks; you would be running weekly anyway. -
But they clearly want an option that's between once a week and once a month. Why not 'more than once a month'?
-
I'm not a linguist but as "few" isn't a clearly defined number but means a low amount in general, it probably means "every two/three weeks" in this context.
There's nothing that says it has to be longer than a month. -
@deadlyRants The ambiguity of ‘few’ is certainly an issue. I’d say ‘few’ means at least 3 though, with ‘couple’ taking the 2 ground.
-
I suspect they're working from the assumption that people tend to think in terms of the largest reasonable units for the time period under discussion, as well as using context clues to imply that the second answer means less frequently than weekly but less frequently than monthly. People think in sequences, and the survey is written to exploit that fact.
-
@deadlyRants I've always heard a "few" as 3+. A "couple" is 2. Just as @joycestick said.
-
I think "once every couple weeks" would be a more evenly-spaced option to include.
-
devios157776yI think “few” has a slightly different meaning when you’re talking about trends. I would take it to mean “averages around three weeks”.
!dev
What's the difference between the middle two options? Surely 'a few weeks' is about as long as or longer than a month?
random
survey design